LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS THEATRE, 1821.
CHAPTER XIV.
LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS.
Lincoln’s Inn, originally belonging to the Black Friars before they removed Thames-ward, derives its name from Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, to whom it was given by Edward I., and whose town house or inn stood on the same site in the reign of Edward I. Earl Henry died in 1312, the year in which Gaveston was killed, and his monument was one of the stateliest in the old church. His arms are still those of the inn and of its tributaries, Furnival’s and Thavies inns. There is yet extant an old account of the earl’s bailiff, relating to the sale of the fruit of his master’s garden. The noble’s table was supplied and the residue sold. The apples, pears, large nuts, and cherries, the beans, onions, garlic, and leeks, produced a profit of £9: 2: 3 (about £135 in modern money). The only flowers were roses. The bailiff, it appears, expended 8s. a year in purchasing small fry, frogs, and eels, to feed the pike in the pond or vivary.[665]
Part of the Chancery Lane side of Lincoln’s Inn was in 1217 and 1272 “the mansion house” of William de Haverhill, treasurer to King Henry III. He was attainted for treason, and his house and lands were confiscated to the king, who then gave his house to Ralph Neville, Chancellor of England and Bishop of Chichester, who built there “a fair house;” and the Bishops of Chichester inhabited it there till Henry VII.’s time, when they let it to law students, reserving lodgings for themselves, and it fell into the hands of Judge Sulyard and other feoffees. This family held it till Elizabeth’s time, when Sir Edward Sulyard, of Essex, sold the estate to the Benchers,[666] who then began enlarging their frontier and building.
The plain Tudor gateway with the two side towers soaked with black smoke, the oldest part of the existing structure, was built in 1518 by Sir Thomas Lovell, a member of this inn and treasurer of the household to Henry VII., when great alterations took place in the inn. What thousands of wise men and rogues have passed under its murky shadow! None of the original building is left. The Black Friars’ House fronted the Holborn end of the Bishop’s Palace.[667] The chambers adjoining the Gate House are of a later date and it was at these that Mr. Cunningham thinks Ben Jonson worked.[668]
The chapel, of debased Perpendicular Gothic, was built by Inigo Jones, and consecrated in 1623, Dr. Donne the poet preaching the consecration sermon. The stained glass was the work of a Mr. Hale of Fetter Lane. The twelve apostles, Moses, and the prophets still glow like immortal flowers, bright as when Donne, or Ussher, watched the light they shed. One of the windows bears the name of Bernard van Linge, the same man probably who executed the windows at Wadham College, Oxford.[669] Noy, the Attorney-General and creature of Charles I., a friend of Laud, and the proposer of the writ for ship-money, put up the window representing John the Baptist, rather an ominous saint, surely, in Charles’s time. Noy died in 1634, before the storm which would certainly have carried his head off. He left his money to a prodigal son, who was afterwards killed in a duel,—“Left to be squandered, and I hope no better from him,” says the dying man, bitterly. It was Noy who decided the curious case of the three graziers who left their money with their hostess. One of them afterwards returned and ran off with the money; upon which the other two sued the woman, denying their consent. Mr. Noy pleaded that the money was ready to be given up directly the three men came together and claimed it.[670] Rogers tells this story in his poem of “Italy,” and gives it a romantic turn.
Laud, always restless for novelties that could look like Rome, and yet not be Rome, referred to the Lincoln’s Inn windows at his trial. He wondered at a Mr. Brown objecting to such things, considering he was not of Lincoln’s Inn, “where Mr. Prynne’s zeal had not yet beaten down the images of the apostles in the fair windows of that chapel, which windows were set up new long since the statute of Edward VI.; and it is well known,” says that enemy of the Puritans, “that I was once resolved to have returned this upon Mr. Brown in the House of Commons, but changed my mind, lest thereby I might have set some furious spirit at work to destroy those harmless goodly windows, to the just dislike of that worthy society.”[671]
The crypt under the chapel rests on many pillars and strong-backed arches, and, like the cloisters in the Temple, was intended as a place for student-lawyers to walk in and exchange learning. Butler describes witnesses of the straw-bail species waiting here for customers,[672] just as half a century ago they used to haunt the doors of Chancery Lane gin-shops. On a June day in 1663 Pepys came to walk under the chapel by appointment, after pacing up and down and admiring the new garden then constructing.